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Is your API description public, and does it match your API?

By Mark KashefPublished October 8, 2026

This check reads a public machine-readable API description, such as an OpenAPI document, and notes which operations it says need sign-in. Publishing one can be deliberate, and it is also a map of your API.

What does this check look at?

It looks at whether a machine-readable API description, such as an OpenAPI document, is public, and which operations it says need sign-in. Deep then uses the description to test some read operations one at a time, and reports any that answer without sign-in separately. Tools meant for developers, like a public list of every API action or a query explorer, left on in the live site, are one of the things Lockpick's guide warns about.

Only a Deep scan runs it, after you prove you own the site.

See whether your site has this. A Deep scan walks the whole site, the scripts it loads and your API surface.

Run a Deep scan

What does a result mean?

What the report showsWhat it meansWhat to do
Info findingA parsed description is public.Decide whether it should be, and test permissions on the real API.

What a description says about permissions does not prove what the running API enforces. A clean result means nothing was found in what the scan read. It does not prove the problem is absent from parts the scan never sees.

How serious is a finding?

This is information only. It claims no weakness, so it carries no verdict, and you decide whether anything should change. Confidence starts high, because a response from your site shows the thing itself. The report lists what to fix by how directly someone could use it, not by the severity label.

Which standards does it relate to?

StandardReference
OWASP Top TenA02:2025 Security Misconfiguration
CWECWE-200

Each one is a related control, not a verification. A scan sees what anyone online can see, so it never proves a whole requirement is met.

Fix it with your AI

Keep it public on purpose or move it behind sign-in, and either way test the API itself.

Fix prompt for any coding agent
My API description document (OpenAPI or Swagger) is publicly reachable. Tell me whether anything in my app needs it to be public. If not, serve it only to signed-in staff or remove it from the production build. Either way, list every operation it describes and check in my code that each one enforces authentication and checks the caller owns the data, then add a test per route that a request with no session is refused.

How to check

Say Atlas, our example app at atlas.example, serves its OpenAPI document to anyone. A Deep scan parses it, notes three operations with no declared sign-in and tests the safe ones once each.

Deep scans come with the Deep plan, and pricing shows what it includes. Pulse or Deep explains what each scan reads, and the full list of checks shows the rest.

Questions people ask

Is a public API description a vulnerability?

No. Many public APIs publish one on purpose. It becomes a problem when it describes routes that should be private and those routes do not check who is calling.

Does Deep call every operation in the description?

No. It only sends a read-only request to a limited number of operations that need no input, within the scan budget.

Run this check on your site

Only a Deep scan runs this check, once you prove you own the site. Deep walks your whole site, the scripts it loads and your API surface.

Run a Deep scan

Related pages

  • Is your interactive API documentation open to anyone?
  • Does your API skip the sign-in its documentation promises?
  • Does an API route on your site answer without signing in?

Sources

  1. How we rate findings Lockpick docs, read on October 7, 2026
  2. Your admin page is online Lockpick docs, read on October 7, 2026

About the author

Mark Kashef, Founder of Lockpick

I'm Mark, and I build Lockpick. I write these pages, and each one is checked against its sources before it goes live. The Updated date changes only when the page itself does.

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Lockpick is a security scanner for vibe-coded apps. It checks what your live site exposes and what a GitHub repo or AI skill would do before you install it, then gives you a fix prompt for Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor or Claude Code.

Lockpick assesses public pages you are authorized to test, and public GitHub code it never runs.

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